By Matthew Phelan Senior Science Reporter For Dailymail.Com

A 'beautifully preserved' sunken landscape, complete with a network of rivers and estuaries, has been mapped in 3D surrounding a submerged 7,000-year-old city. 

The scanning effort follows last year's discovery of a nearby Stone Age road 13-feet beneath the Adriatic Sea, which once connected this ancient city to the mainland.

The city, known as Soline, was built on an artificial landmass by the ancient Hvar culture — but began to slowly sink off the coast of what is now Croatia as sea levels rose with the melting glaciers of the last Ice Age, starting around 12,000 BC.

An international team of researchers now hope to use this 'astonishing' and uniquely undisturbed drowned geography to better assist them in strategizing their deeper hunt for more of the Hvar people's ancient submerged sites and artifacts.

 

A 'beautifully preserved' sunken landscape, complete with a network of rivers and estuaries, has been mapped in 3D off the coast of Croatia - surrounding a submerged 7,000-year-old city. Efforts to 3D map the geography around this ancient city under the Adriatic Sea began in 2023

 

'It's a more diverse landscape and it's better preserved than we expected,' according to geo-archaeologist Dr Simon Fitch, the new project's lead investigator. Above, a 3D map from Dr Fitch's past project mapping the submerged landscape of Doggerland in the North Sea